Overages send technical college pay soaring past lagging UW salaries

Jan. 4, 2013

By the numbers

801 — technical college instructors receiving at least $20,000 in overages in 2011-12 22 — UW professors receiving at least $20,000 in overages in 2011-12 372,536 — students enrolled in the 16 Wisconsin technical colleges in 2012-13 180,686 — students enrolled in the 26 UW schools in 2012-13 $13,320 — cost per full-time equivalent student among the technical colleges in 2011-12 $9,853 — cost per undergraduate student in the UW System in 2011-12, excluding funding for non-instructional activities such as research, farm operations and hospitals 22 — women among the 50 highest-paid employees in the technical college system 4 — women among the 50 highest-paid employees in the UW System 30 — UW System support staffers receiving $25,000 or more in overtime in 2011-12, led by UW-Madison steamfitter Edward Corcoran at $57,000 4 — technical college employees earning more than $25,000 in overtime, none above $40,000 12 — years of experience for the average technical college instructor 12 — years of experience for the average UW professor Source: Gannett Wisconsin Media analysis of open records data, University of Wisconsin System, Wisconsin Technical College System

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Deb Seline’s base salary is around $85,000 after 13 years at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, but last year she was one of two instructors to push her compensation beyond $200,000 — higher than 11 of the state’s 16 technical college presidents — by accumulating overage pay for additional teaching.

Statewide, 67 instructors piled up more than $50,000 in overages, pushing the average pay for technical college instructors above that of the average University of Wisconsin professor, according to 2011-12 salary data from both systems obtained by Gannett Wisconsin Media through open records requests.

The salary data, which includes the 29,000 UW employees and 7,800 technical college employees paid $25,000 or more, revealed full-time technical college instructors were paid an average of $90,000 statewide in 2011-12, a figure that includes base pay and overages.

Total pay among professors at the 13 UW universities averaged $86,000 in 2011-12, when including full-time professors, assistant professors, associate professors and professors emeritus. If the largest UW schools in Madison and Milwaukee are excluded, the average plummets to $70,000.

Overages soared under union rules

Overages — also referred to as overload or adjunct pay — are a budgeting staple throughout the state’s technical college system, but nowhere more than at NWTC in Green Bay, which spent $7 million on overages in 2011-12. All but four of the school’s 200-plus instructors received some level of overage in 2011-12, and the overages averaged more than $25,000 per instructor, $6,000 more than any other technical college.

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“This is a very deliberate practice on our part. We’ve taken the position we would rather pay overages than hire more faculty” with benefits, said H. Jeffrey Rafn, president of NWTC, where Seline accumulated $121,000 in overages last year. “Having said that, I don’t like $121,000. That’s not my favorite number.”

Rafn said paying overages costs about $5 million less per year than hiring additional instructors with benefits. Northeast posted the lowest cost per student in 2011-12.

The overages will be more spread out this year, however, as the passage of Act 10 means administrators can decide who gets extra classes, instead of seniority dictating eligibility. Like many other college administrators, Rafn said overages — and overall personnel costs — will drop because Act 10 allowed schools to extend the number of classes covered by base salary and decrease the amount paid for overages.

But Rafn’s approach to overages is not universally embraced. At Western Technical College in La Crosse, instructors averaged only $2,470 in overages in 2011-12, easily the lowest in the state.

Western limits overages “as much as possible” by hiring additional contracted or part-time staff, said Mike Pieper, the college’s vice president of finance and operations. Rafn defended high overages as cost-effective and a means to get good teachers in the classroom more, but Pieper said Western places higher priority on keeping a “work and life balance” for instructors and ensuring staff diversity.

“If we’re limiting opportunities to bring people on because we’re doing so much with overloads, we think we just limit our opportunities again for a new voice, another set of eyes, someone that can help us move the college forward,” Pieper said.

Despite the low overages, Western posted the fourth-lowest cost per student in 2011-12, due in part to the average instructor salary of under $62,000. That was lowest among the state’s 16 technical colleges.

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In terms of base salary, Milwaukee Area Technical College posted the highest average at $93,000 per full-time instructor. Fox Valley Technical College ranked seventh at $73,000 despite being the state’s largest technical college based on 2012-13 enrollment.

The instructor with the most extreme overages, Seline, said she aggressively pursued the extra work in the 2011-12 school year because of impending changes from Act 10. She estimated she worked 10 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, grading papers and answering about 150 emails daily for her online-only slate of communications classes.

“It was the year from hell, because all I did was grade papers,” Seline said. “It was not fun, but it was an opportunity that I took advantage of. … I don’t know what’s going to happen with my ability to retire, my ability to work, anything like that. The economy was really bad.”

Gateway Technical College Instructor Daniel Neuman, who was a close second with $116,560 in overages, took on the extra work more out of necessity, as he was the only industrial mechanics instructor in an area where needs in that field were exploding. Gateway serves Racine, Kenosha and Walworth counties.

Neuman said he typically left home at 4 a.m. and returned at 10 p.m. He taught no traditional courses, instead providing customized on-site training at an array of area businesses to improve efficiency, fill in skills gaps and train employees on new equipment. He noted the work is a revenue generator for the college.

UW salaries trail peers

The pay gap between UW and technical college faculty — slight as it may be — underscores a long-standing trend in Wisconsin academia: state school professors are underpaid relative to their peers.

Full professors at UW-Madison are paid 27 percent less than the median at 11 comparable universities, according to a UW salary study using 2011-12 data. Associate and assistant professors are both more than 10 percent below the median.

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The study — which examined universities with similar enrollments, degrees, budgets, and missions — showed UW-Milwaukee’s professors are 20 percent below the median of their 14 comparable schools. The 11 smaller UW universities were compared to a group of 31 other schools, and all 11 fell within the bottom 13 for professorial pay.

Among the 13 UW colleges, the average faculty member (including full, associate and assistant professors) was paid $56,487 in 2011-12, less than the average base pay for teachers in 69 of the state’s public school districts. The number was slightly ahead of the $53,575 state average for public school teachers, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

A commission UW convened to study salaries in 2010 determined continuing low pay levels would have a “damaging effect” on the UW system and the state of Wisconsin as a whole.

The highest-paid professor in the UW System is UW-Madison finance professor Randall Wright, whose 2011-12 salary of $441,000 made him the fifth-highest-paid employee overall, behind only Athletic Director Barry Alvarez, basketball coach Bo Ryan and now-departed football coaches Bret Bielema and Paul Chryst.

Wright — described by his dean as one of the nation’s leading economic theorists and researchers — was recruited to UW-Madison from the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Dean François Ortalo-Magné of the UW School of Business said Wright’s reputation as a researcher and mentor has raised the university’s profile and helped attract three significant new faculty members.

“These things kind of snowball, and they’re snowballing exactly like we hoped they would,” said Ortalo-Magné. “It’s really had a transformative effect on the department, and it’s having an impact on the school.”

In 2011-12, UW-Madison had 51 professors earning $250,000 or more. But despite that upper echelon, full-time faculty (including full, associate and assistant professors) averaged $106,000. That’s $5,000 less than the average instructor at Milwaukee Area Technical College, when factoring in overages.

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“Especially when you get to UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison, we’re not just talking about professors who teach. We’re talking about professors who bring in literally millions of dollars in outside research funding that then employs dozens of other people,” said David Giroux, UW System spokesman. “There’s great risk with us tolerating lagging salaries for any length of time, because then we start losing not only the human talent but also the resources they’ve attracted.”

Though overages were a significant factor in technical college pay, they were far less of a factor at the UW schools, particularly at UW-Madison where professors receive no extra pay for teaching additional classes.

Professors at UW-Milwaukee averaged about $900 in overages in 2011-12; the school uses them for emergencies but does not budget to use them intentionally. The other 11 UW universities averaged a little more than $3,000 in overages. No professor received overages of more than $26,000 in the 2011-12 school year, though 22 were over $20,000.